


Requiem

by teapig



Series: The Terror one-shots [4]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Grief, Hurt but no comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, ep 10 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 17:55:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14753562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teapig/pseuds/teapig
Summary: There's no happy endings here - only a million swirling "what if?"s drowning Silna's mind after she found out what happened to her only real friend on those ships.





	Requiem

**Author's Note:**

> All I can say is that I'm sorry. The idea's been haunting me, and had to be put down to rest somehow.

Silna was quickly becoming incredibly tired of the day. After a gruelling time with the visiting shaman, trying desperately to connect with Tuunbaq and end the bloodshed, she’d stepped out to find his broken body strewn across the shingles. At least he’d taken that rat of a man out with him, going by the tattered remains that had once made up a certain Cornelius Hickey. Now, she found herself dragging their leader across the land, hoping that she could hand him back to his own people to take care of him when he was so badly wounded. _I couldn’t save Tuunbaq – but if I can save his life in return_ …  
It was with that resolve she’d approached the camp, half expecting to have to dodge bullets as she did so – they’d taken enough of her peoples’ lives by now, why would she be any different? The silence in the camp soon told her that this was unnecessary – that any help it might have held was long gone. What she’d give for Harry to run out right about now, curls rioting in every direction, flustered, talking a mile a minute, yet still understatedly competent.

Seconds later, she came to a standstill, wishing that she’d never even dreamt of it. For there he was, flesh and bone – both exposed to the creeping Artic autumn as he lay, thrown to waste, cast off as if he were as many rags. Part of her wanted to run, tell herself it was only an illusion created by her overtired mind. _They would never… they couldn’t have…._ Instead, she left the captain on her sled and crept forward quietly – almost as if he was sleeping, as if she was afraid to wake him – but in reality, there is nothing she could’ve wished for more. Who knows how long he’d been lying there, his face frostbitten and grey in death. Holding her breath, she reached out, running her hands through his curls, pushing them away from that infinitely kind face – one now marred by lines of tiredness, of grief, of internalised agony… She stayed there a while, kneeling next to him, memorising that face before pressing her forehead to his for a brief moment, as had brought them both comfort in the past. It was then that she spotted his wrists, and her confused anger fell away into horrifying clarity. _They hadn’t been brave enough to end the life of a man as good as this – instead, they’d pressured him to do so for himself, and then taken advantage of it… He couldn’t even escape them in death_. Her stomach burned with a different kind of hatred now – a deep, burning rage that anyone could break down someone as utterly, inherently good as Harry to become… this.

The bitter wind was beginning to whisk through the camp again now, and she pulled her furs up around her instinctively, before noticing the way it stirred and tugged at the dead man’s curls, as if it was trying to drag him awake, force breath back into his lungs, movement to his limbs... Leaving him exposed to the cold, even now, felt profoundly wrong. She stuck her head into the nearest tent, doing everything she could to ignore the pool of blood that had stained the shingle as she grabbed a blanket, which she wrapped round his body. _I’ll be back_ , she promised under her breath, words garbled by her lack of tongue. In the morning, once the captain was stable and sleeping, she’d find a place where the sun set everything around it ablaze, as if it was glowing from within. She’d lay him to rest there, in the arms of the natural beauty he’d once tried to find words to explain. She’d stopped him then, telling him that she knew what he meant. Now she wished she’d continued to listen, so that she could treasure the memory of his wonder-filled eyes rather than his cold, dead face.

The night was a bitter one; the wind howling, threatening to snuff out the firelight as she nursed the wounded captain, trying to block his unconscious groans from her mind. At the very least, he wouldn’t die alone now – not like Harry, she thought, desperate, suffering, and utterly alone. Settling in for the night, she couldn’t keep her mind from drifting to where he lay in the dusk.  
What if she’d been there a few days before? If she’d somehow found the camp, crept inside, found him there – could she have stopped the bleeding before it was too late? Even if she couldn’t, she could’ve at least been there with him in those last few moments, easing his passing – just being a gentle, familiar presence, like he’d been for her on the ships… The ‘what ifs’ circled her mind, eating away at her. What if she’d got there just ten minutes before _it_ happened, persuaded him to leave, got him out of there one way or another – he could still be alive right now, helping her nurse the sick Irishman before her.

But deep down, she knew this was all just useless speculation – she was putting far more faith in their friendship than she ought. Whether she’d patched him up after his attempt, or somehow averted it altogether, something must have been deeply, utterly broken in him for him to have even tried. She’d never met anyone who’d placed quite so much emphasis on the intrinsic value of human life – he’d never give up hope on life if there was even the slightest possibility that it could be saved – he wouldn’t leave a situation in which he believed that he could have helped. Even if she had intervened, she realised then, it would only have been a matter of time until the doubt would have sunk in again, the claws of tiredness that had scarred his face returning to tear him open once more. How many times could she really have saved him? _And_ , the darker side of her mind asked, _How many times would it be fair, would it be kind to do so?_ Would it really have been that much better for him to drag him out into the unknown, forcing him to stay in her world with no chance of returning to his ‘England’, or to the family, those people who lit up his eyes with a kind of fondness when he spoke of home… Or would he slowly have fallen apart before her, leaving her powerless as he died there too? Then he would’ve died wracked with even more guilt weighing on his heart, at having forced anyone to witness that again, let alone someone he’d called a friend. Better for her, perhaps. But torture for him.

In the morning, she’d step back out into the cold. She’d wrap his stone-cold, limp body one more time, leaving him semi-warm, and safe from anything (or any _one_ ) else that might come across him. She’d dig a grave, and lower him down into peace at last, singing softly in the words that she’d once spent hours teaching him. All she wanted was to make sure he could find his rest – it was the least she could offer now, and still far less than he deserved. When he woke, she’d ask the captain to tell her more about what happened, try to fill in the gaps, find any scrap of comfort that Harry might have had towards the end…

But for now, she settled in for a long night’s watch, haunted by the memories of the kindest man she’d come across, her companion and friend in these chaotic last few months – _or was it closer to years by now?_ His family would likely never learn what had happened to their sunbeam of a child, and for that she was almost glad. For all they knew, he had fallen asleep in the snow and simply never woken up. They would never know how much he had suffered – but neither how strong, how brave, how kind he had stayed throughout this journey. And so she huddled, watching the flames dance as she thought how easily this could have been avoided – how none of this needed to have happened, that this blood price should never have been paid. It all left her wracked with the deep regret of what could, should, and ought to have been.


End file.
